Week of rage and inevitable AR-15

In the final chapters of Stephen Markley’s unsettling new novel Ohio ,I came across a passage that – given the dismal events of the last week -- hardly seemed like fiction.

Markley described would-be killers parked outside an American mosque, armed with an

AR-15, two pistols and plan to gun down innocent worshipers. “In the mind of the perpetrators, this would serve as a warning to the religious group they saw as most responsible for the troubles of their homeland.

“Like many young men, convinced of their cause, but with only vague notions of how the murder of innocent people will advance the interest of their tribe, they had no particular end game in mind, only to rack up as many kills as possible.

“In their fantasies, they saw it as sparking the final crusade, the war for the heart of their nation, in which those with only white skin would finally band together and push out all invading faiths and blood lines.”

Markley’s imagined incident, in a book released two months before all hell broke loose, seemed all too contemporaneous, all too real.

I came across that passage the day after the Kroger killings in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, the mass murder that might have been. Gregory Alan Bush, 51, first tried to enter an historic black church where worshipers lingered after a mid-week service. Unable to gain entrance – locked church doors being another sad feature of modern America – Bush drove to a nearby supermarket and settled for the killing two elderly shoppers.

Both victims seemed to be random choices. Except, of course, they were both black. “Don’t shoot me and I won’t shoot you,” Bush told an armed white man he encountered in the parking lot. “Whites don’t shoot whites.”

Two days later, Markley’s description of unhinged, bigoted white-man rage found relevance right here in Broward County, as federal agents descended on a van parked outside a Plantation auto parts store. Inside the van, which was festooned with pro-Trump stickers and hateful slogans and posters disparaging Trump’s perceived enemies, the feds found Cesar Altieri Sayoc Jr., 56, whose fingerprints appeared on several of the 14 bombs mailed to the objects of his ire, including, among others, CNN, former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

Murderous hatred was not yet finished imitating Markley’s writing. The day after Sayoc’s arrest, a 46-year-old white man armed with three pistols and an AR-15 assault rifle burst into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, screaming anti-Semitic epitaphs as he murdered 11 congregants. Six others were wounded in Robert D. Bowers’ shooting spree, including four policemen.

Bowers, whose social media accounts reflected a sump of anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant ravings, was apparently inflamed by the wildly embellished rightwing talking point that a ragtag group of Honduran pilgrims was about to invade the U.S. via the Mexican border. (The President and his surrogates, mindful of the coming election, have hyped the caravan into a mythic threat to national security, laden with terrorists, criminals and carriers of serious diseases, including leprosy, tuberculosis, even small pox – never mind that particularly malady was eradicated three decades ago. One wonders how such a disease-ridden band of migrants perseveres on their thousand mile walk.)

It was too much for Bowers who blamed Jews in general and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in particular for providing humanitarian aid to refugees. “Damn the optics,” he tweeted. “I’m going in.”

Like the characters in Ohio, the killers and the would-be killer in last week’s incidents seemed to have no real strategy other than to foment terror. Perhaps they hoped to inspire a bloody pogrom against Jews, immigrants, blacks, George Soros and anyone critical of the divisive demagogue occupying the White House.

An awful week like this, dominated by seething social deviants planning “to rack up as many kills as possible,” reignites a particular anguish in South Florida, where less than nine months ago, another murderer with another

AR-15 stalked the halls of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School.

This was the week, too, that Michael Avedon’s harrowing photograph of bullet-scarred Parkland survivor Anthony Borges was featured on the cover of New York Magazine. Anthony, shot five times, was among 25 survivors of school shootings from the last halfcentury profiled in the gut-wrenching issue. Think of them as survivors of the American condition.

Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, who was in the sanctuary of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue when that killing spree began, had written a few words in the temple newsletter last July despairing that the tragedy at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas was fading from the news cycle. “Tragic event – thoughts and prayers – call to action by our elected leaders – hang wringing – next news event.”

Prescient words, as the next terrible news event crept the rabbi’s way.

Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@gmail.com), a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a reporter and columnist in South Florida since 1976.